Japan's new govt may 'fracture' US alliance: opposition

TOKYO (AFP) - – Japan's conservative opposition leader warned on Wednesday that a six-week-old centre left government had harmed the traditional US alliance over a lingering dispute centred on a US military base.

The row over an airbase on southern Okinawa island "may fracture the Japan-US relations of trust and lead to a standstill in the nation's security policy", opposition leader Sadakazu Tanigaki said.

Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who took power last month, has pledged to review a 2006 agreement to relocate the controversial US Marine Corps Futenma Air Base from an urban to a coastal part of the island.

Hatoyama has suggested the base -- which has angered residents because of aircraft noise and frictions with US servicemen -- could be moved off Okinawa altogether, an idea Washington has strongly opposed.

The United States, which occupied Japan after its defeat in World War II, now has 47,000 troops stationed in the country, more than half of them on Okinawa, the site of one of the bloodiest battles of the war.

The base issue has clouded Japan's security ties with its most important ally ahead of a Japan visit by US President Barack Obama in mid-November.

Hatoyama, answering Tanigaki in a parliament debate, said: "We are reviewing the issue comprehensively. Needless to say, I will make a final decision."

Tanigaki -- the new president of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party which was ousted in August elections -- also attacked Hatoyama's management of the economy, which is slowly emerging from its worst post-war slump.

He criticised plans by Hatoyama's Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) to step up social welfare spending, charging that "the government is releasing massive funds to every household, which is just pork-barrel politics".

"It's very dangerous to leave the future of Japan to the DPJ, whose policies and administrative management are quite unreasonable," Tanigaki said.

Hatoyama rebuffed the criticism, arguing that the extra spending would help stimulate domestic demand in the world's second largest economy.

The premier vowed he would resign if his government failed to fulfil its campaign promises, including expanded child care allowances, an end to expressway tolls and to offer free public high school tuition.